Question regarding search functionality

[ubbuser]

Hi I noticed the following with vBulletin installed here on this site:

I typed in "prune pm" as my search words into the "search this forum text box" located in the bottom of the forumtopics display.

However the search engines comes back and complains that the word "pm" contains less than 4 chars..?

Why does it only see "pm" and not "prune pm" as a complete word? For a layman that could be confusing. Is there a work around this? Thanks.

[Wayne Luke]

"prune pm" is not a single word it is two words as signified by the space between them. If you read the fine print on the search page what you are searching for is "prune AND pm" meaning the post has to contain both. Since one word falls under the minimum limit of characters then it can't find any posts with the other since you used the default boolean and specified you wanted both words.

Some people say using the wildcard feature is a work around for this so you could search for "prune pm*".

One your own forum you can specify the number of characters needed for the limits. This will affect the size of your database though as the search tables grow exponentially in respect to the number of posts made.